“The void shines — radiance, the flow of time, presence, the life force — it’s an ongoing explosion, an ongoing big bang.
[…]
What this already inherently is, is the kicker.
You can’t not have that, it is an absolute given.
All the pressure is off. That’s freedom.”
THIS…
NOW…
Is the whole enchilada.
The ongoing big bang.
The perpetual miracle.
The fact that you exist at all, is the thing to look at.
Where is all of this occurring?
What is it all made of?
You can’t say, so stop trying to…
EXPERIENCE ITSELF is so much more than we take it to be.
What is experience?
We endlessly fixate on the apparent content of experience…
And spend so little time looking at the context.
But the context is the juice.
The secret.
The enchantment.
The fact that any of this is here at all, is the thing to look at.
Get drunk on it, let it seduce you, be silly, make animal noises…
Break yourself out of conditioned normalcy…
THIS is anything but normal…
The farthest thing from mundane…
Experience, man. EXPERIENCE!
It’s dripping with intrigue.
It’s sopping and soaked through with lusciousness.
Where is it coming from?
BOOM!
There it is: Inescapable, omnipresent Being…
Continually rendering in perfect HD clarity, no downtime, no lag time…
How???
Get curious about this, like you were as a child.
You sensed that there was some hidden treasure within it all.
Well, THERE IS!!!!!!!
The joke is that it’s not hidden.
It’s YOU!!!!!!!
It’s the only thing you’ve ever been, seen, heard, smelled, tasted, thought, felt, touched.
The Mystery!!!
THE ASTONISHING MIRACLE OF EXISTENCE!!!
The mind can’t understand this—not even close.
So chuck the mind aside for a few and just FEEL THIS.
Feel the texture of it: The richness, the playfulness, the slipperiness, the indefinability, the immediacy, the bizarreness…
Feel the way it constantly morphs and shifts, each nanosecond vanishing as soon as it appears, blooming into the next once-in-eternity iteration of NOW….
The seemingly infinitesimal shifts moment-to-moment are not infinitesimal… Look closer, become more sensitive… Everything is entirely different one moment to the next…
It endlessly opens into itself, to more of itself, unfolding and unfurling spectacularly, yet never departing from itself…
You don’t know what will happen 7 seconds from now. You never know.
THIS is always spontaneous, always unexpected… let it be the nonstop surprise that it actually is.
Be with IT in raw and primal and naked and intimate ways.
Go back to first principles. Pre-mental. Pre-linguistic.
THIS exists prior to concepts about it.
And concepts themselves are made of nothing other than THIS.
THIS is the only ‘thing’ here.
The One Astonishing Miracle.
Boredom is not boredom.
Despair is not despair.
Loneliness is not loneliness.
Look closer.
What are the ‘feelings’ made of?
What are these unsayable shades and shadows and textures that dance within the light show?
Be with them as directly-felt energy-presences.
Be with the wholeness of experience as a directly-felt energy-presence.
Then what is it?
_______________.
…
…
…
The Miracle is here.
Always with you.
You can’t get a handle on it.
You don’t need to.
Its ungraspability is its freedom.
Its inscrutability is its weightlessness.
It is preposterously intelligent.
And it dances.
It plays.
That’s all it does.
And it’s you.
You are this Miracle.
Love,
JB
P.S. If you haven’t yet claimed your Christmas gifts from me + joined us in The Astonishing Miracle of Existence Community on Telegram, I invite you to do so. :)
Many of the above phrasings were inspired directly by Peter Brown. More than any other teacher of enlightenment, I recommend Peter’s work. He is a gem.
Jordan Bates savors the miracle. Join his community on Telegram, The Astonishing Miracle of Existence.